Perl Programming on NT

Course Length: 4 days, $119 per book

Perl has been described as C, awk, sed, and shell programming all wrapped into one language. Learn how to take advantage of Perl's power through examples and extensive hands-on exercises. This course introduces object-oriented programming in Perl using an NT environment.

Audience: Programmers and system administrators.

Prerequisites: User-level skills in the NT environment are required. The ability to write programs in a high-level, structured language (such as C) is recommended.

Overview of Perl

What is Perl?
Running Perl Programs
Perl Scripts as Executable Programs
Sample Program
Another Sample Program
Yet Another Example

Perl Variables

Three Types of Variables
Variable Names and Syntax
Variable Naming
Lists
Scalar and List Contexts
The Repetition Operator

Arrays and Hashes

Arrays
Example - The @ARGV Array
Array Functions
Array Slices
Hashes
Hash Functions
Scalar and List Contexts Revisited

I/O: Input Operations and File I/O Filehandles

The open Function
The Input Operator <>
Default Input Operator
The print Function
File Operation Functions
Reading Directories

Operators

Perl Operators
Operators, Functions and Precedence
File Test Operators
Assignment Operator Notations
The Range Operator
Quotation Operators
Pattern Matching Operators

Flow Control

Simple Statements
Simple Statement Modifiers
Compound Statements
The next, last and redo Statements
The for Loop
The foreach Loop

Regular Expressions

Pattern Matching Overview
The Substitution Operator
Regular Expressions
Special Characters
Quantifiers (*, +, ?, {})
Assertions (^, $, \b, \B)

Subroutines

Overview of Subroutines
Passing Arguments
Local Variables
Passing Names
Returning Values

Quoting and Interpolation

String Literals
Interpolation
Array Substitution
Backslashes and Single Quotes
Command Substitution
Here Documents

References

References
Creating References
Using References
Passing References as Arguments to Subroutines
Anonymous Composers
Hard References as Hash Keys
The Symbol Table

Complex Data Structures

Two-dimensional Arrays
Anonymous Arrays and Anonymous Hashes
Arrays of Arrays
Arrays of References
A Hash of Arrays
A Hash of Hashes

Packages and Modules

Packages
BEGIN and END Routines
require vs. use
Modules
The bless Function

Object-Oriented Programming in Perl

What is Object-Oriented?
Why Use Object-Oriented Programming?
Classes, Objects and Methods in Perl
Inheritance, the "is-a" Relationship
Containment, the "has-a" Relationship
Overloaded Operators
Destructors

Advanced Regular Expressions

Substrings
Substrings in a List Context
RE Special Variables
RE Options
Multi-line REs
Substituting with an Expression
Perl5 RE Extensions

Binary Data Structures

Variable-Length (Delimited) Fields
Variable vs. Fixed
Handling Binary Data
The pack() Function
The unpack() Function
The read () Function
C Data Structures